by Gail M. Burns, December 2007 Without Gail Nelson and Billie Holiday there would be no Barrington Stage. In the summer of 1995 Julianne Boyd, following her stint as the artistic director of the Berkshire Theatre Festival, announced she was starting her own company and her first production would be Lady…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December, 2007 But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas Time…as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December 2007 Irving Berlin’s White Christmas is both an attempt to present the beloved 1954 film musical “live on stage” – an effort that is doomed to failure because film and theatre are two completely different art forms – and an excuse to sing and dance to…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December 2007 I confess that I have never seen or read any version of Cyrano de Bergerac before entering the Copake Grange on December 1, although that is hardly necessary since the basic plot of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play has entered the American vernacular. Everything from cartoons…
Comments by Gail M. Burns, December 2007 Okay, before you read what I have to say, you must click HERE and read what creator and performer Heather Raffo has to say about her work. The on her Web site is so concise that either to quote it or to try to restate it in…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December 2007 David Lindsay-Abaire wrote Rabbit Hole after fellow playwright and former Juilliard teacher Marsha Norman (‘Night, Mother) told him to write a play about something that frightened him. Being a good playwright, he wrote about death, because there is nothing bigger and scarier in the entire…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December, 2007 “The death I would prefer would be to break my neck off the back of a good horse at a full gallop on a fine day.” – Fanny Kemble I pick up a pen and write the letter “A.” A serviceable letter that…
Reviewed by Gail M. Burns, December 2007 “Is this what Christmas has degenerated into, Doctor? It’s pure commercialism. Is there no true Christmas spirit left in the world?” Maybe I am turning into a real Grinch in my old age, but the NYSTI production of Miracle on 34th Street left me absolutely…
